Again, when asserting the inviolability of moveable, as distinguished from landed, property, I was careful to limit the assertion to property honestly acquired. I never supposed it possible to acquire by prescription 'a fee simple in an injustice.' Only, if in any particular instance it be suspected that property has been acquired by force, fraud, or robbery, I contend that the _onus probandi_ lies on him who raises the question. It is for him to show, if he can, that a commercial fortune has, as Mr. Mill suggests, been built up by 'jobbing contracts, profligate loans, or other reprehensible practices.' But if this cannot be shown, the validity of the actual possessor's title must not be impugned. Property must be treated as of innocent acquisition and derivation until proved to be of guilty. And that not merely because there could otherwise be no rights of property at all, since it must always be impossible for any owner to demonstrate that neither he nor any one of those from whom he derives ever either overreached in a bargain or failed in a contract; but also, and much more, because whether a person be or be not the rightful owner of the wealth in his possession, no one can possibly be entitled to despoil him unless the wealth can be shown to have been ill-gotten. That right must be held to be complete with which no one can show a right to interfere. The gravest, however, of Mr. Mill's criticisms is that mine is 'a doctrine _a priori_, claiming to command assent by its own light, and to be evident by simple intuition.' This is an imputation to which I am so unaware of having laid myself open that I can account for its having been made only on the supposition that Mr. Mill, in common with most other Utilitarians, imagines that their only opponents are Intuitionists, and that it is only necessary to set aside the tenets of these in order to get their own established instead. If this were really the case, utilitarian advocacy would be a comparatively easy task. Intuitionism, whether capable or not of being disproved, is by its nature unsusceptible of decisive proof. If I, in support of the proposition that there is in the human mind an intuitive sense of any sort, were to assert that I had such a sense while you denied that you had, it would be impossible for me to prove you to be mistaken, while, unless you were mistaken as to your individual experience, I should clearly be mistaken as to the generalisation which I had based upon mine. But I never said a word about an intuitive sense of right and wrong. How could I, seeing, as no one who chooses to look can fail to see, that the instincts of untutored children prompt them to disregard all rights but their own, to spit cockchafers, rob birds' nests, and confiscate younger children's cakes and apples? All I say is that there may be and are rights independent of and even opposed to utility, and these, for reasons which shall immediately be stated, I call natural